Recently, I’ve been seeing more maps in the main Google search engines results pages.
And while these are sometimes useful – when searching for local businesses for example – I think that sometimes these maps just clutter up the already busy search results pages.
For example, when you search for American Pie there’s a map of what seems to be the filming location of the film with the IMDB page listing:
And in a search for the 101 there’s a link to a map of a street in Boston, USA:
In both of these cases, the address was html text in the page Google linked to. But anyone searching for a map of these locations would probably try a longer more descriptive search phrase in the first place.
I also recently noticed a map for BBC television centre for a search for simply ‘BBC’ (although the map no longer appears for this search):
How many people searching for the BBC website would have found this map useful? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10,000?
Impact on SEO
Thankfully, it looks like Google is testing these maps in the SERPs. And at least the maps they display actually relate to the page in question.Unlike in these examples.
But for me it raises questions – is more information always helpful? After all, we are more savvy when it comes to using search engines these days. And we refine our searches to find what we are looking for. Do we need extra information pushed at us from Google? And is Google intelligent enough to guess what we are looking for anyway?
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